


The 1925 Women's Golf Finals

by The_Passing_Queer



Category: Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Genre: Future Fic, Gen, Golf, Old Friends, Past Relationship(s), Rivalry, Sequel, Sports, bad driver, welcome to the public domain old sport
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-10
Updated: 2021-01-10
Packaged: 2021-03-14 03:42:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,281
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28664127
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Passing_Queer/pseuds/The_Passing_Queer
Summary: "THE BRONX, NY: Contentious sportswoman Jordan Baker is making her first repeat appearance in the Women's Golf Finals - her first since that troublesome controversy back in 1921. Her opponent is Catherine Ludeman, a young upstart who has made a fast rise to success. Who will come out on top in this battle between fair opponents?"He said he would come, once. But he won't hold to that promise. Would he?A quick fic centering on Jordan Baker, doing the thing she's famed for, but never shown doing in the novel. A reflection on past romance, and how our relationships change as time goes by.
Relationships: Jordan Baker & Nick Carraway, Jordan Baker/Nick Carraway
Comments: 1
Kudos: 8





	The 1925 Women's Golf Finals

_ "You're a rotten driver," Nick protested. "Either you ought to be more careful or you oughtn't to drive at all." _

_ Jordan smiled. "I am careful.” _

_ "No, you're not." _

_ "Well, other people are," she said lightly. _

_ "What's that got to do with it?" _

_ "They'll keep out of my way," she insisted. "It takes two to make an accident." _

\- - - - -

She normally would have selected the grass club, but Jordan selected the driver instead. 

From the crowd, she could hear the distinctive, familiar clicks of the journalists, as much from their tongues as from their flash bulbs. They’d hounded her ever since the beginning, chasing the forgotten story once again––the once-disgraced golfer returning to the finals for the first time since that ugly bit of business with the sand pit. Jordan had avoided the press during the first go-around, had waited until the caddy retracted his statement and the story faded away. She knew her own integrity, and didn’t need it repeated back to her in newsprint.

She teed up. The leather of the handle was rough beneath her gloves. She looked down at the worn edges of the fabric, at the hole slowly growing at the end of the pointer finger. She made a promise to pick up a new pair once she returned to New York, after the finals were done.

Jordan tilted her head up, lining the horizon with the brim of her bucket hat. Her eyes narrowed as her gaze cut through the listless grey air. The roiling clouds on the horizon called out that rain was imminent, but the club had gone ahead with the final anyway, crossing their fingers that Mother Nature could take an interest in golf for the afternoon.

For a moment, the clattering sound of the journalists died away, and Jordan leapt upon the brief silence. She glanced down only briefly, before pulling her arms back, and bringing the driver into the ball with a startling  _ thwack. _

Polite applause colored the air as Jordan watched the white dot make its way across the fairway, settling successfully on the lighter patch of green after a few excitable bounces. 

“Fair play, Miss Baker,” came the voice from behind her. Jordan didn’t look back, and adjusted a stray hair behind her ear.

“You wouldn’t mind clearing the teeing ground, miss?” asked a second, lower voice. Jordan stepped to the side, wishing for a cigarette and adding the notion to request one to her mental notes, alongside the replacement gloves. As she floated away, Garth, the source of the lower voice, stepped into the box alongside Catherine. 

Catherine Ludeman––the young upstart who’d thrashed her way into the tournament with a trio of hole-in-ones––had been often compared to Jordan in the papers, even before it became apparent they would face off in the finals. “The two women share a similar strength in their approach,” the article had argued, “and similar weakness on the putting green. Not to forget, of course, their revolution in feminizing the image of the sport.” 

While her caddy, Edith, had scoffed at the notion, Jordan took it as confirmation that her couture in her appearances hadn’t been ignored. Skirts freed her legs, allowed for sudden movements while swinging the clubs without the fear that she’d tear the fabric––not forgetting, of course, the practical matter that it made her silhouette in newspaper photographs unmistakeable. 

Which is what had bothered her so much about Catherine’s decision to play the game in the same attire. It was an infringement, a misprint. As Jordan watched her tee up for the shot, her gloved fingers groped for a cigarette. 

_ Thwack _ .

More polite applause followed Catherine’s striking of the ball. As the crowd moved along, scurrying as one mind to where the balls had landed further down the grass, Jordan noticed Garth and Catherine moving closer.

“Fair play,” Jordan repeated, taunting Catherine with her own words. 

“I thank you, Miss Baker,” Catherine said, with a slight nod of the head. “Now come, let’s wrap this up before the weather turns.”

“You don’t melt in the rain, I hope?” asked Jordan, shifting her eye to the dimming sky.

“I did spend quite a pretty penny on a new hat for the tournament.” Catherine grinned, brushing a finger along the edge of a mustard-colored cap. “Wouldn’t want to see the wool ruined.”

Jordan said nothing, but motioned knowingly to Edith, who hoisted her golf bag onto her shoulder. “Come, we’ve only a few swings to go.” 

That should have been the end of their brief discussion, by any account. Jordan’s opponent in that first, infamous final had barely spoken to her more than a kind congratulations on her albatross at the third hole. Thus, neither Jordan or Edith were prepared for the chipper voice to pipe up again with: 

“Funny it’s such a close game, isn’t it?”

Jordan stopped, her heel digging into the carefully trimmed grass. She turned her head just slightly, just enough to show one glassy green eye to Catherine as he responded.

“Just keeping it interesting, darling.” 

Her walk away was faster than before. 

\- - - - -

“I haven’t seen him in the crowd yet,” Edith responded, as they approached the crowd, already salivating just yards from the ball. 

“I didn’t say he was guaranteed to come,” Jordan scoffed. “Six-iron.”

Edith handed it off to Jordan. “Was he at the semi-finals?”

“This was the promise he made me one night in New York,” Jordan recalled. “If I were to ever reach the finals again, he’d be there.” 

“Did you tell the club?” 

“Why bother? He’s got money enough now for his own ticket.”

“He’s in properties?”

‘Bond man,” Jordan corrected. “At least he was when he made it.”

She walked out onto the green, casting a wide glance over the gathered crowd. In the center of her heart, there was a true doubt that Nick would have arrived at all. Still, it would have been well-aligned to his character to follow through on a promise made once, in the haze and memory of a wild sojourn to the city center. Not much of that summer was pleasant to recollect––not much of her time alongside Nick was pleasant to recollect. But what little had remained with her included more than a few of the times she’d dragged him along to matches, and the one rollicking party at that failure of a mansion in West Egg. 

She saw no sign of his foppish hair among the sea of flatcaps. 

Exhaling, Jordan took in the spot where she’d landed the ball. The green was just around the bend in the course, probably a three-hit series away from finishing with a birdie. Of course, she could knock it over the green for the eagle, but only if she was worried about Catherine doing the same. With a lead of only one below her opponent, Jordan hadn’t prepared for a close eighteenth hole. 

Catherine’s ball had landed slightly further forward on the fairway. She could manage the birdie on similar grounds, though it wouldn’t guarantee her anything better than a tie unless she expected Jordan to make an error and bogey the final hole. A tall order, certainly. And something Jordan had no intention of doing.

She lined the edge of the iron up with the ball, pulled back behind the shoulder, and swung.  _ Thwack _ .

Before she even followed the ball, she knew it was headed in the wrong direction. Too straight, not enough curve on the release. It would fly over the edge of the fairway and about a yard into the rough. Clapping from the crowd, no louder than before, mocked both her ears as she sulked back to Edith and the bag. 

“Could still be a birdie,” Edith said. “All you have to do is get it onto the green.”

“I need to replace these gloves,” Jordan repeated. The hole in the pointer was growing, and the pinky grew more threadbare with each swing.

In front of them, on the fairway, Catherine had selected a three-iron, and was teeing up. Her skirt, cut just below the knees, danced with the gentle wind as the crowd watched with renewed focus for a possible upset. 

Jordan bit her lip.

_ Thwack _ .

The ball moved as though it spun along the edge of a massive ring, a clean and whirling arc that took the ball into the rough, and then, with a heavy bounce, back onto the fairway, with the edge of the green only spitting distance away.

Jordan didn’t raise an eyebrow, but behind her smoke-starved lips her teeth gnashed. Her fist, tucked under her chin in a contemplative silhouette as she watched Catherine and Garth walk away, shot back down to her side. The other hand jutted out, only to bring Edith along on the walk. 

Edith, slow of pace and short in stature, puttered up to Jordan, keeping pace with her slender gait. “You’re still ahead by one,” Edith recalled. “And you know she’s weak once she’s on the green.”

“You don’t have a cigarette, do you, Edie?” Jordan said, straining her tongue to refrain from snapping at her caddy. 

“I’ll avoid answering that, on a non-smoking course.”

“What do you think for this shot? Four-iron? Three?”

“Four seems safe. You need the distance.”

“Dammit all.”

\- - - - -

The crowd had barely moved from before, huddled in a curve of the course that provided an equitably plush view of the latter fairway and the approaching green. Jordan considered one final glance to the crowd, one final look out for Nick’s eyes, but decided against it. At this point, she couldn’t handle knowing if he was there until after the score was finalized. Her mind had to be clear as the summer sky.

As she approached the patch of rough that was keeping her ball hostage, she recognized Garth only steps from the edge of the fairway. Edith was just pulling out the four-iron when he stepped into her path. 

“Miss Ludeman sent me to observe Miss Baker’s shot,” he spoke.

“To observe?” Jordan repeated. She felt her head warming under the bucket hat. 

“Only to ensure a fair lie,” said Garth. He placed Catherine’s bag on the ground by his side, marking his intention to stay. “Surely there would be no problem with an observer.”

“Of course not,” Jordan replied, acidicly. “Though I wonder why Miss Ludeman doesn’t come to join us herself, and sends her viceroy in her stead.”

Garth blushed, apparently thinking the unfamiliar term to be one of endearment rather than belittlement. “My eyes work as well as hers––perhaps better.”

Edith, the only one among the quartet in spectacles, pushed them further up the bridge of her nose. 

“So be it,” Jordan said, lifting the four-iron above her shoulder. Confidently, she approached the ball. The green was on a raise in the course, so she’d be hitting the ball up and over, rather than the downward path of the fairway before then.  _ Perhaps _ , she considered,  _ the wind will drop the ball right into the hole. _

It wasn’t to be, she knew deep down. But foolish hope had brought her success before. 

She looked up at the crowd once again, chiding herself for doing so even as her head tipped up. No sign of Nick.

Her vision narrowed on the ball. Under her gloves, the pulse in her wrist quickened. She wanted that cigarette more than ever, could almost feel the smoke under her chest even now.

_ Thwack _ .

Not wanting to watch the ball in its inevitable arc, Jordan turned to the crowd for their reaction. She’d just pulled a glove off in frustration when a man in the crowd stepped to the side and those sky blue eyes, grey in the misty light, arose from behind to stop her breath.

\- - - - -

The first time she’d seen Nick, Jordan had taken note of his jacket before anything else. Under the wafting fabric of Tom and Daisy’s open lounge, the stranger was dressed too tightly, too buttoned up for early summer. The warm air rippled the edges of Daisy’s dress, seeming to lift her off the divan, and even her own form-fitted cream empire gown felt a small ripple from the wind flowing through the parlor. 

With her chin held high, she had measured this new stranger against the foreboding silhouette of Tom, and found it unlikely that the two would have willingly associated with each other, were it not, of course, for the collegiate connection. For the remainder of that evening––an evening, she later considered, that would somehow extend through that summer and into the autumn––she would operate on the assumption that this stranger had no desire, save the obligations of past memory, to be in their presence. He protested this, certainly, but Jordan had a way of knowing secrets of this sort.

As Jordan became more familiar with the flavor of the man, she no longer saw the careful buttoning of his coat as mere discomfort, but instead as a sort of defense against the nation of New York. Not against the New York that Jordan knew––the city that had raised her up, spit her out, then welcomed her back into its gaping maw––but against the shadow of the city that stretched across the midwest and reached people like Nick in their suburban bungalows. With each new pocket of her life that Jordan had pulled Nick into, she could sense the imprinting of another shade onto the clear slate of his mind. 

Her first impression, that sedate meeting in the acrid Buchanan household, hadn’t been altogether truthful, and whether she intended the reversal or not, Jordan had spent the better part of her time alongside Nick in a process of reeducation about who she was. The time in modeling, the time in the news-paper business, the time as a golf champion––and all before she had run out her thirtieth year. Nick asked little and revealed nothing about himself, fashioning himself as the passive observer that even Jordan, blunt as ever, had not the heart to remind him that he wasn’t. 

And then that cab ride: stumbling out of Hanna’s clutching her furs to her chest, a hand wrapped around Nick’s upper arm, her low heels hard against the wet pavement. As the yellow door had opened, they’d both fallen down into the seats. Jordan and Nick both knew where the evening was headed, and neither had a mind to put on the brakes as their cab shuttled them to West Egg. When had Nick made the promise about attending the finals? Was it in that cab itself? Or once they had reached his cardboard shack between those grotesque palaces? It couldn’t have been after they entered the home, since they’d straight away gotten into…

The evening was a blur that Jordan, hard as she had tried over the last few years, hadn’t been able to sharpen.

\- - - - -

Jordan’s eyelid twitched. Was Nick aware that she had noticed him? No, he’d been staring right back at her when she first saw him. He had to know. But should she look back? She tried to remain focused on Catherine, as she lined up her shot, but the impulse to steal a glance into the crowd was difficult to resist. Under her breath, she called to Edith.

“Blue-grey eyes, no hat, center of the crowd.”

A moment’s hesitation followed, after which Edith’s voice answered in conspiratorial whisper.

“That’s him! You saw?”

“Is he looking at me?”

“...Looks like he’s watching Catherine.”

Jordan turned her head to confirm her suspicion. The silhouette was unmistakable: Nick had made good on his promise. 

_ Thwack _ .

A cheer rose up from the crowd as Catherine’s ball landed safely on the green, just yards from the hole. Catherine turned and issued a friendly wave to the crowd, before turning to Garth and ushering him off to the side. Her heels, a cheap imitation of the grey Oxfords that Jordan wore, seemed to clack down the course, even against the grass.

The crowd moved slightly to get a better view for Jordan’s upcoming swing.

“He’s shorter than I thought,” Edith reported, as Nick came into view. “Darker hair. And his suit looks freshly pressed.”

“No doubt he wanted to make a good impression,” Jordan said.  _ Or he bought a new suit for the occasion, _ she considered. Nick wasn’t quite the same as he’d been that wild summer of ‘22.

Edith held her spectacles out, focusing. “Are you going to speak to him after the match?” she asked. 

“What an unexpected man,” Jordan repeated, to herself as much as Edith. He really did hold to a promise made in the hazy unreality of that midsummer night. 

“Miss Baker?”

“I...suppose it couldn’t cut me too deeply.”

Jordan and Edith sauntered along the course, under the watchful eye of not just Nick but the entire crowd in which he was enmeshed. Jordan held the four-iron close––she’d never given it back to Edith––as they passed Catherine and Garth on the opposite side of the fairway. 

Catherine tossed the same papery wave towards Jordan, with the same expectant grin. 

Jordan simply tilted her head, respectfully distant. Above her eye, an eyebrow arched discouragingly.

Jordan’s ball had landed at the outside edge of the green––far enough away to make putting unviable, but perhaps close enough that a well-measured strike could land the ball closer to the hole than Miss Ludeman, keeping the hole a volley between the players, rather than sending Jordan to a consecutive shot. It would require a focus that Jordan, that face in the crowd unseen but calling to her, could not, for her own stability, muster.

She exhaled. The heat under her hat once again was at the forefront of her senses...the leather of the handle on the club...the fraying ends of the gloves... _ treat each hole like the last one _ …

The breeze danced with the hem of her skirt, brushing an unseen finger along the edge of her calf. 

_ Thwip _ .

The ball barely lifted off the ground, landing comfortably on the green and rolling, down the ever-so-slight decline and towards Catherine’s ball. Every eye on the course followed the white spot as it traversed the manicured grass. At the last possible moment, the ball ran out of energy and came to a rest––less than the width of a finger apart from its competitor––but between Catherine and the hole.

Clapping from the crowd was punctuated with the odd “good show!” or “my word!,” but nothing stuck in Jordan’s ear quite like the “Bravo!” whose timbre she instinctively recognized. 

Turning to Catherine, she offered only a papery wave of the hand. 

“Miss Ludeman,” she cooed, “it’s your shot.”

\- - - - -

The written accounts of the game left out much of the relevant information about that eighteenth hole.

The trophy did say that Jordan Baker had taken her first Championship, holding victory out of the reach of newcomer Catherine Ludeman by only one stroke––and that was not inaccurate. 

Newspapers listed the temperature and wind speed on the course––which meteorologists can confirm was the case.

A look through the ledgers for the clubhouse would accurately recount the participants––including a Mr. Nick Carraway, resident of Peoria, IL. 

But much of what mattered that day, only Jordan herself could recall. 

The shadow in the eye of Miss Ludeman after her second putt,

the kindness of the breeze as it calmed the nerves of the players,

the bright assurance in the blue eyes that Jordan looked deep into as the crowd cheered, the only gaze in the sea of faces that she cared to return.

Perhaps he wasn’t such a bad driver as she’d thought.


End file.
